Ezreal/Strategy
Skill usage * strength as a marksman comes from his versatile kit, high mixed damage, and attack speed steroid from . His , , and have decent range and good utility, encouraging a caster playstyle, and his can deal high burst damage to multiple targets. However, he is very reliant on landing his skillshots for most of his damage output. * has one of the lowest base healths at Level 1. Utilize the range from your skills to keep yourself safe. * By aiming in brushes and watching your cooldowns while listening for hit sound, you can see if enemies are hiding in a brush. ** Keep an eye on your stacks and whether they increase/refresh. This aspect allows you to check brush with other abilities as well. * can utilize the and masteries to stack up a fair amount of extra damage with successive spells and auto attacks against enemy champions. However, players must be more aggressive and ensure that they land their skills. * If attacking a tower with an ally, you can use on them to boost their attack speed. Hitting the friendly champion will proc , granting you attack speed as well. * In the lane, early burst damage and poke is very high. Combine this with a support or jungler's crowd control to get some kills. * Do not underestimate damage when building Ability Power. With some aim, AP can easily harass and burst enemies down safely behind minions. * Remember that can be used to jump terrain spots and walls in the jungle. It is your best escape mechanism. ** Be careful using it offensively in a skirmish as people will know to focus you while it's on cooldown. ** Take note of the surrounding area. If is low on health and tries to over a wall, the escape attempt may hurt you if the homing missile targets a jungle monster and pulls aggro. ** The missile will track the closest target after uses . Keep this in mind when using the skill offensively near enemy minions. * Use to help line up your other abilities, but avoid using it in situations that would leave you vulnerable. * You can line up to hit multiple minion waves or monsters. * Do not hesitate to use to just farm a creep wave or defend a turret. By spamming , the cooldown for will come back up very quickly. With maxed cooldown reduction, its cooldown can end up as low as 30 seconds. * can be used at the beginning of a team fight to instantly gain 5 stacks of . * takes approximately 12 seconds, from the start of casting time, to reach the enemy summoning circle from your own. * benefits from the two neutral buffs more so than most ADCs. allows to use his skills with impunity and allows him to kite with . ** With some vision control, can be used to steal the enemy's own buffs. ** With perfect timing and ward placement, can be also used to steal away a kill or even . * can be saved for teamfights or 1v1 situations to finish off enemies as they run away. Since the range is global and does a massive amount of damage you can kill low health enemies with a well-aimed ultimate. ** Never forget that is global and you may be able to snipe an enemy champion from all the way across the map if you have good aim. You can also use it to soften up an enemy that you are aiming to fight. ** Having teammates with good CC like or can make it much easier to land your skills and make the enemy take the full brunt of your . ** If you decide to snipe a fleeing enemy, make sure they don't have any sort of heal, shield, or invulnerability. ** While has high base damage, the falloff could be the deciding factor in getting a kill; to get the most out of it, try to hit your target without it hitting minions. ** Use when the enemy has no vision of so that they will be unable to warn their teammates. *** Note that can be seen through the fog of war, so a wary opponent can watch for it and avoid it from a distance. ** has a channel time upfront and is easily dodged by skilled players. For this reason, it is often a good idea to use it to hit an entire team immediately after the battle starts, dealing significant total damage and granting multiple stacks of . ** is especially powerful in Dominion, delaying enemies' attempts to capture your towers and buying crucial time. Due to its relatively low cooldown in conjunction with , use it wisely and use it often. * Smart casting will give you a faster response time, allowing you to hit more abilities. ** Smart casting can help you dodge a lot of otherwise deadly situations. Build usage * deals physical damage. Stacking up on armor penetration runes greatly increase the damage this skill deals, especially in the lower levels. * has several options regarding using armor penetration and armor reduction in all of his builds (Mind the notes regarding armor penetration): ** is a good early item for an attack damage or hybrid (attack damage and ability power) build, granting attack damage, armor penetration, and cooldown reduction. ** can be used as an all-around item complementing well into mid to late-phase. While a less to not-effective option for ability power, its strength for and improving auto-attacks with attack damage and armor reduction make it a good item against low - mid armor champions. ** complements for and attack damage. While less-useful for regular auto-attack than , the armor penetration is the strongest against mid-high armor stacking champions, it is an amazing item against tougher enemies. Its low cost makes it an affordable purchase in the early-phase. However, it's not exactly suitable for ability power and/or hybrid builds as is. * You can play either as a ranged physical or caster DPS depending on how you build him. Additionally, a burst caster build could potentially be viable on him, using a to burst down squishies easily. ** Physical damage per second plays like a ranged damage per second, utilizing autoattacks, and for burst damage, and other abilities for utility and supplementary damage. ** Caster damage per second plays like an area of effect caster, utilizing and to damage multiple targets in battles while using for supplementary damage and cooldown reduction. * is a good item early game (upgrading to or later on) if you run out of mana too quickly. * The casting of procs damage buff, which is then applied when the shot hits the target, thus increasing its damage. ** If you miss , auto attack the enemy once before casting again. The same applies for using other abilities before casting , as not using the can decrease your DPS considerably. * / improve his kiting ability. * Alternatively, provides an area slow when hitting any enemy with , making it great for catching out people or separating enemies. ** If using a primarily AP build, will scale better than or . * can be stacked quickly using . On cast, it procs one stack, and procs a second stack if it hits the target. * cannot critically strike, so deciding between items such as and would be determined by whether you want pure damage or sustain respectively. * When building AP, and will provide decent stats for a relatively low cost. ** is another option for mana regen and is slightly more defensive. However, it is a decent option for those who enjoy using their skills constantly. * Depending on what you build, can choose to pick up an , or both. ** Within the preparation phase of Dominion in the early 1:20 minutes, can start collecting Mana with by keeping every ability on Cooldown. This can serve as a minor improvement for the early phases. ** While the bonus Mana pool of and are the same, they complement each other very well. Getting both requires a high level of farm though. Nevertheless, each item is very useful if quickly farmed and can be a fundamental part of most builds. * can trigger passive, making it a core item on any AP build since it increases AP ratio from .4 to .9 (in addition to 75% of your base AD), with Arcane Blade increasing that further to .95. can increase this to a 1.1 AP ratio. * can work well on AP as it provides Attack Speed, Cooldown Reduction to continuously spam and Ability Power to increase the power of all his skills, for a relatively low cost. * , , or are useful for , allowing him to escape enemy crowd control effects and reposition in teamfights. Recommended builds Countering * is fairly squishy at early game. Harassing him early will hinder his gold and experience gain. * Three of his spells deal magic damage. Buying a or early will help you mitigate his damage if he builds towards those spells. * has a global range. Take care when recalling when your health is low. ** The projectile can be seen through fog, watching the map while recalling can help you notice it soon enough to move out of the way. ** Although is a channeled ability, you cannot stop the channel with hard CC. The only way to prevent him from ulting mid-cast is by killing him. * All of abilities are skill shots. Buying movement speed items will make it easier to evade his spells. * When dueling an as , try using to dodge their first . Immediately, you are in a good place to chase them, have dealt more damage, built a stack on , and have a cooldown advantage. If you can dodge while they are casting , you will have an even greater advantage. For this reason, be careful using offensively against another . * cannot trade fairly during close combat and relies heavily on poking. Having a champ that can dash or blink towards him (i.e. , , ) would cost his blink to run away from the team fight and be isolated from the defending allies causing his death. * Pure AP suffers from a weak early game; his burst is very mana-intensive, he loses his only non-flash escape-skill when using offensively, he cannot reliably push a lane and he lacks any kind of crowd control effects. In exchange, he becomes a very high damage dealer in the mid and late game due to his high AP-scaling and massive AoE-damage. In this case, it is even more effective to dodge his skillshots by moving erratically. **In teamfights, try to spread out so he cannot hit the whole team with his + -combo. Champion Spotlight First Spotlight Category:Champion strategies